Shuffle Master have also developed optical card shoes
If entrepreneurs didn’t understand by now that Technology was taking over the business world, now it is encroaching on the gambling casinos. We can’t even escape it on our trips to Las Vegas.
Casino chips embedded with RFID tags and are being examined at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino and will undoubtedly be displayed this month at the new $2.7 billion Wynn Las Vegas resort and casino.
The chips will each be given an original player code to monitor behaviour and potentially get more revenue out of high rollers. It’s projected that this could be a $100 million business by the year 2010.
You can find two Vegas based companies that own the casino-RFID game: Progressive Gaming International and Shuffle Master.
Progressive’s TableLink, which reads RFID chips using table-embedded antennas and records the wagers on a dealer’s PC, is the system of choice in the two casinos. Progressive and Shuffle Master have developed optical card shoes, which holds decks and scan cards as they are dealt. Shuffle Master’s Intelligent Shoe has already been getting rave reviews in Australia and Asia.
The price of outfitting a table with all the chips and antennas costs a casino about $8,000, but analysts predict that Progressive will score bigger bucks from the $6 per day per table it charges for its system.
One RFID chip costs a casino 40 cents more than a regular processor, but that gross profit will drop to about 10 cents in the coming months. This is really a ”technology jump” from the ”eye in the sky” that we all understood around in the casinos, but I do not believe that even George Orwell would have thought of these chips.
Those of us who used the games in Vegas casinos to escape our computers and software applications, look destined to be followed by technology no matter where we go. Somehow Radio-Frequency Identification in poker/gaming chips just does not appear to be what a great poker player expects.